MacMillan's Reading Books eBook

The blood from the first blow was trickling down his
face in a thin streak; he wiped it with his arm, and
when he saw the stain, he said, “Into thy hands,
O Lord, I commend my spirit.” At the third
blow, he sank on his knees—­his arms falling,
but his hands still joined as if in prayer. With
his face turned towards the altar of St. Benedict,
he murmured in a low voice, “For the name of
Jesus, and the defence of the Church, I am willing
to die.” Without moving hand or foot, he
fell fiat on his face as he spoke, and with such dignity
that his mantle, which extended from head to foot,
was not disarranged. In this posture he received
a tremendous blow, aimed with such violence that the
scalp or crown of the head was severed from the skull,
and the sword snapped in two on the marble pavement.
Hugh of Horsea planted his foot on the neck of the
corpse, thrust his sword into the ghastly wound, and
scattered the brains over the pavement. “Let
us go—­let us go,” he said, in conclusion,
“the traitor is dead; he will rise no more.”

DEAN
STANLEY.

[Note: Thomas Becket (1119-1170).
Chancellor and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury
under Henry II.; maintained a heroic, though perhaps
ambitious and undesirable struggle with that king for
the independence of the clergy; and ended his life
by assassination at the hands of certain of Henry’s
servants.]

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*

THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH

The triumph of her lieutenant, Mountjoy, flung its
lustre over the last days of Elizabeth, but no outer
triumph could break the gloom which gathered round
the dying queen. Lonely as she had always been,
her loneliness deepened as she drew towards the grave.
The statesmen and warriors of her earlier days had
dropped one by one from her council board; and their
successors were watching her last moments, and intriguing
for favour in the coming reign. The old splendour
of her court waned and disappeared. Only officials
remained about her, “the other of the council
and nobility estrange themselves by all occasions.”
As she passed along in her progresses, the people,
whose applause she courted, remained cold and silent.
The temper of the age, in fact, was changing and isolating
her as it changed. Her own England, the England
which had grown up around her, serious, moral, prosaic,
shrank coldly from this child of earth, and the renascence,
brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous, irreligious.
She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed
it, and now that they were gone she clung to it with
a fierce tenacity. She hunted, she danced, she
jested with her young favourites, she coquetted, and
scolded, and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done
at thirty. “The queen,” wrote a courtier,
a few months before her death, “was never so
gallant these many years, nor so set upon jollity.”
She persisted, in spite of opposition, in her gorgeous
progresses from country-house to country-house.